A cultural hackathon take place 2021-11-25 to 2021-11-28, organized by the city of Gütersloh (Germany). Unfortunatelly, there were 25 (!!) challenges and about 150 participants, so teambuilding and deciding, which challenge to chose, was a challenge for itself.
I was open for 17 of these challenges, so I searched a team, which seems to have more than one other member and has chosen a challenge already. Found it very soon (two UI designers) and for the next teambuilding sessions via zoom, I aquired two more team members, which could have fitting abilites.
The challenge was named "Kunst hinter den Kulissen" ("Art backstage") by the Marta Herford museum and the topic was, that only 5% of the artpieces are shown in public exhibitions, the other 95% are in some kind of storage, maybe no one will see, except the museums employees. That is so sad. And other museums doesn't know about these artpieces, so they cannot beg to lent. How do you drag these works of art to the light?
Inspiration
The core of the idea was to make a public API, which can be quired and used from every place, webpage, app. Then base of this API, we would do some use cases to show, that the concept it working.
What it does
Information and meta information about work of art is shown in a big databases and can access via an API. The data will be enriched by other meta data, such as a mood matrix, generated from an AI, wich show, this picture could be "sad" or "engaging" (in percentiles). So you can combine it with another mood based services, which can connect it to matching music.
A museum can share his artwork and a user can drag artwork in "his" collection and picture it - e.g. an art school make an online exhibition with the artwork by a specific artist with his work over all continents. Or a privat person can show his favorite art in his collection.
As a use case the frontend in the team build a game, which based on a users collection. In this game, you can walk through a labyrinth and you get some task on the paintings, e.g. the picture is represented as a scrachtcard and you have to scratch it free in 10 seconds with your fingers (mobile fone) or the mouse. Or take a quiz.
The second use case was some kind of dashboard for a museum to ask the interface about the own artwork and find artwork from other museums. The first step to some kind of administration.
How I built it
Backend was build in PHP/Lumen, the gaming app was build with react, accessing the API life and the dashboard in frontend HTML and Javascript, accessing the API life.
Challenges I ran into
Data provided by museums are not very structured. In this case, the data was in Excel (misused as a database) and the table rows were not consistent, so I had to do a clean up by the data first. Because they were not providing so much data (15 art pieces...), I wrote an importer for some thousend art work from wikiart and found a dataset with AI generated mood informations about pictures - and I combined it. That was a nice challenge for me.
At the end, the time was challenging too, because the frontend dev and I we were the only devs in the team, so I could not finish my dashboard - it was fully functionally, but ugly - means no CSS and (beside the pictures from the art work) no graphic elements.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Combine all data and make an appropriate database API fully working with ten endpoints & their parameters, so I could show it in the presentation.
What I learned
I learned a lot about museum organization. And that is nothing new to learn, but don't think if customers say "we have data in files", that the data is useable from the start XD
What's next for "Kunst hinter den Kulissen" - Kulturhackathon OWL
Because the challenge setters want a database, the team is talking about it with the museum to implement it for them... maybe. Unfortunatelly, they don't get it, that the database is fully working already :D and they only remembered for the game, not for the dashboard, they thought, the dashboard was just a mockup... :P
Second challenge is the financial aspect. They have no money at the moment.
Let's see...
Neverthelesse, we were the overall winner against all challenges, we took the extra price for the best B2B solution and won the audience price
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